Katharine Blodgett Gebbie, revered leader at Boulder lab, dies at 84

Beloved mentor to four Nobel laureates in physics

Internationally renowned JILA and NIST scientist, Katharine Blodgett Gebbie, died Wednesday at the age of 84. (Courtesy Photo)

Katharine Blodgett Gebbie, mentor to four Nobel laureates in physics and revered by her peers as a visionary physicist in her own right who long presided over a key laboratory at Boulder's National Institute of Standards and Technology, died Wednesday. She was 84.

Gebbie was the director of the Physical Measurement Laboratory and its precursor, the Physics laboratory, at NIST for 21 years. She split her time between NIST's Boulder campus and its headquarters in Gaithersburg, Md.

At the time Gebbie died, due to complications from an infection, she was serving as a senior advisor to the current director of the Physical Measurement Laboratory, which includes more than 1,000 scientists, technicians, administrative staff and guest researchers.

"Katharine was fiercely loyal to NIST and a role model to me and many other NIST scientists and staff," Willie E. May, Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and NIST director, said in a prepared statement.

"She recruited and nurtured a remarkably talented staff over most of five decades. She was perhaps the only research director anywhere to have had four Nobel Prize winners in physics reporting to them at the same time. We are deeply grateful for her outstanding public service and will miss her daily."

Scientists at the NIST Physics Lab and PML who claimed Nobel Prizes in Physics from 1997 to 2012 were William Phillips (1997), Eric Cornell (2001), John Hall (2005) and David Wineland in 2012.

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"She was famous for trying to identify good people and supporting them and letting them go and not meddling or micromanaging. I think overall, she was very successful at that," Wineland said. "She had this attitude, as I say, of identifying good people. Identifying them, and watering them and letting them grow."

Cornell said: "She was just a great motivator, the sort of person who, you always feel like she believed in the stuff you were doing more than you did.

"There were a couple of clutch times in my career, mostly early on. When I was facing challenges of a professional or personal nature, and actually almost thought about chucking it in. And she was very instrumental in saying, 'Things are going great. We believe in you. We'd do it all again. We'd hire you again tomorrow.'"

Rare honor in December

Gebbie was trained as an astrophysicist, and in 1968 began her NIST career at JILA in Boulder, a joint institute managed by NIST with the University of Colorado. Since 1990, Gebbie had lived in both Bethesda, Md., and Boulder, but working primarily at the NIST headquarters in Gaithersburg.

"Especially, in more recent years, a lot of her presence here was on video conferences. That's just the way the modern world works," Cornell said. "When I first started here in the 1990s, it was much more common to see her walking down the corridor, in person."

Wineland said: "When she would come out, she would always make a point to visit several of us. My wife and I got to know her personally. When she would come out, she would usually stay at her place in the mountains, behind Boulder, there. She had that with her husband."

Gebbie was the recipient of many other honors, including the 2006 Presidential Rank Award, the Government Women's Visionary Leadership Award — also in 2006 — the Service to America Medal (Career Achievement Award) in 2002, the U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal, plus election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and more.

She was also a strong advocate for women and minorities in science, technology, engineering and mathematics careers. Two world-renowned physicists at JILA who worked for and were mentored by Gebbie won MacArthur Fellowships — the so-called "genius grants. Those recipients were Deborah Jin in 2003 and Ana Maria Rey in 2013.

"She certainly had to be a role model for a lot of women that, particularly those that maybe started in a technical field and then became managers," Wineland said. "She was, independent of gender, was an inspiration to people that were aspiring, or heading toward management."

All that and a pilot too

Cornell described Gebbie as "a proud person. What she was proud about were the accomplishments of her people. She really measured herself by what her folks got done.

"She wasn't striding around like, wearing something on her chest saying, 'Look at all I got done.' When she was bragging, if you want to put it that way, her finger was always pointed out."

Cornell noted that Gebbie was also, for many years, a licensed pilot.

"She told hilarious stories about a crash in which she was holding the stick when the airplane crashed. A hair-whitening story. Everyone walked out, but the plane was worse for wear."

He added: "She was one of those people whose life was so much her work ... The fact that she hadn't retired, at her age, tells you something right there."

Gebbie graduated from Bryn Mawr College with a B.A. in physics in 1957, and went on to earn a B.Sc. in astronomy and a Ph.D. in physics from University College London in 1964.

She was married to Hugh Alastair Gebbie, a Scottish physicist who died in 2005. Gebbie is survived by her sister, Margaret B. Alkema, of Meredith, N.H.; niece Ada Marijke, of Hamburg, Germany; niece Deborah Alkema, of San Francisco; nephew Jonathan Alkema, of San Francisco; and her long-time friend and housemate, Sara Heap, of Bethesda, Md.

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